Sixty years
ago 24-year-old Dick Williams
set off through the woods of
northern Germany in search of
a "refugee" camp.
The previous day, a German
officer had agreed to hand the
camp over to the advancing
British.

With only a
map reference to guide him,
Williams crossed the German
frontline by jeep and turned
left down an unmarked track.
It was then that he found it:
a vast concentration camp
surrounded by a 10ft high
barbed-wire fence and still
guarded by armed SS soldiers.

Yesterday
Major Williams, now 84,
recalled the moment on April
15 1945, that he and other
British soldiers unwittingly
liberated Bergen-Belsen, near
Hanover, one of the Nazis'
most infamous concentration
camps. "We had only been
told there was a camp there.
We knew that it had dysentery
and other problems, but we had
no idea how big it was, or how
many people were inside,"
he told the Guardian.

"We
drove in. The sentry box was
empty. We kept going. We then
peered through the barbed-wire
fence and saw around 100 SS
soldiers, both men and women,
lined up waiting for us."

Maj
Williams, whose unit was
responsible for providing
water and food, was then
escorted around the camp by
two SS guards. "We had to
thread our way through the
dead bodies. The first ones
were just 50 yards inside the
camp," he said.
"There were bodies
scattered everywhere. Some had
their hands on the barbed
wire. Others were lying on the
floor. Some were sitting up or
resting against each
other."

He added:
"The biggest number of
bodies was outside the
hospital area. They were piled
up, nose to tail, eight to
nine high over a 30-yard area.
There was some evidence they
had tried to do some burying.
We found more bodies in an
open ditch. I have never seen
such horror in my life."

Maj Williams
spoke before an official
commemoration ceremony
tomorrow marking the 60th
anniversary of the camp's
liberation.

Several
hundred survivors from a dozen
countries are expected to
attend the event, together
with leading German
politicians, British veterans
from the Association of Jewish
Ex-Servicemen and Women, some
of whom were there.

Maj
Williams, who landed in France
during D-day and then advanced
into northern Germany, said
the SS soldiers he had met at
the "half-mile long"
camp were unrepentant.

"Two
inmates tried to come and
speak to me. They [the German
guards] brushed them aside.
They showed no interest in
them at all," he said.

He added:
"My job was to see
whether there was food and
water. When I went to the
cookhouse, all I found was
50kg of rotting turnips. The
prisoners were emaciated,
absolutely shrunken. And yet
it took just a day for
[British] engineers to restore
the water supply. This wasn't
a death camp, but a camp of
death. It was wilful
deprivation of food and
water."

Bergen-Belsen,
originally used to house
Russian prisoners of war, was
taken over by the SS in April
1943. The idea was to use the
"detention camp" for
Jews who could be exchanged
for Germans held in allied
prisons. As the German army
collapsed, however, thousands
of Jews from other
concentration camps were
dumped there, including women
from Auschwitz.

Some 50,000
prisoners perished here, among
them the diarist Anne Frank,
together with 20,000 PoWs.

Yesterday
Maj Williams said the local
German population must have
been aware of the camp's
existence. "The nearest
railway was 5km away in the
town of Bergen. Prisoners then
had to walk [to the camp]. The
people of Bergen must have
known," he said.

Despite
Major Williams' efforts to
feed the survivors, 500
prisoners died on the first
night after liberation, and
thousands more succumbed in
the days that followed.
"There was nothing we
could do. Their stomachs were
so shrunken. We ended up
breaking down the rations into
as close to soup as we
could."

The SS
soldiers captured at Bergen-Belsen
were forced at gunpoint to
bury the dead, while the
camp's commandant, Josef
Kramer, was arrested. Two SS
soldiers who tried to escape
under the fence were shot
dead, he added, and dumped in
a mass grave.

"The SS
soldiers realised that
everything was over. Most of
them didn't survive. Kramer
was whisked away a few days
after I arrived," Maj
Williams recalled.

The
commandant and Irma Geese, who
was responsible for women
prisoners, were later
convicted of war crimes and
executed. During his 14 days
organising distribution at the
camp, Maj Williams said he had
watched survivors plucking the
clothes off corpses.

"We set
up mobile shower units where
survivors could wash, have a
haircut and get rid of their
lice. People in the main camp
were infested with lice. If
they saw that a dead person
had a better jacket than they
did, they would simply take
the jacket and pick the lice
off it."

Although
Russian soldiers had liberated
Auschwitz more than two months
earlier, it was newsreel
footage from Bergen-Belsen
that alerted the world to the
existence of the Nazi
concentration camps, and the
full horror of the "final
solution". Yesterday Maj
Williams, who lives in Fareham,
Hants, said he was
disappointed that many young
people in Britain remain
ignorant about the Holocaust.

He is taking
part in a seminar on the camp
tomorrow organised by the
Imperial War Museum. "My
generation know about it, of
course," he said.
"But people in their 20s
and 30s have not shown a great
interest in the Holocaust at
all. It took Britain a long
time to wake up."

He added:
"I'm glad there is more
education now of younger
people. It is essential people
should be told the truth of
that time."